I hate clothes-shopping but also hate spending “too much” money on clothes so I have some legitimate time-saving techniques for buying work clothes on sale! If you have a few stores that you know carry clothing in styles you like and fit you consistently, sign up for their email promos, and then just watch them for for a few months — I auto-filter them into a shopping folder that I only check occasionally, so I don’t feel bombarded by ads. You can usually figure out some patterns to the timing of their sales.

Then, when I know I’m going to need new clothes, I go into the folder and see if any stores are currently having sales, or if any are likely to have one soon. Loft, for example, pretty consistently has a major 40% off sale once a month, so I check when their last 40% off sale was to figure out when they might have another. I usually order online and then return things that don’t work, but if there are convenient physical locations you can also browse the website to get a sense of what sale pieces interest you and then go to a store to look for them specifically, which I find less time-consuming and less stressful than just walking into a store full of things and picking through all of it.

This technique does involve some upfront time investment and also requires you to know specific brands/stores fairly well, so it doesn’t work for everyone, but it’s a tip someone else gave me that I’ve had a lot of success with, so I try to pass it on.